


Once Upon a Neverland

by laniew1



Series: The Lost Girl [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-14
Packaged: 2018-01-01 14:27:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1045027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laniew1/pseuds/laniew1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma is a Lost Girl</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once Upon a Neverland

**Author's Note:**

> There will be more of this, but posting the first part now before I get jossed and we find out that Peter Pan is actually Gold’s dad or something.

**Once Upon a Neverland**

 

 

They spoil her a little because she’s the only girl, Peter has the boys make her a little hut and there’s a bed with gauzy hangings and warm blankets and it takes her a few weeks but she’s finally able to laugh.

Peter gloats about being the first one to coax a smile from her lips and she laughs at the smug look on Felix’s face when he’s able to accomplish the same thing.

“She’s our Lost Girl,” Peter says and he grips her hand tightly and introduces her to all the boys she’s already met.

“She’s our Emma, now.”

 

******************************************************************************

 

There’s a boy living in the outskirts of the village, Emma has seen glimpses of him when she’s wandering looking for berries to eat and gauzy moss to line the walls of her little hut.

“There’s someone out there,” she says one night as she sits close to Peter.

“His name is Baelfire,” Peter says after a moment’s hesitation. “He doesn’t want to live here with us.”

“Did you ask him? Or did you order him?” Emma asks, wise in her fifteen years.

“He’s a Lost Boy,” Peter says, like that’s supposed to explain everything, Emma just looks at him. “He’s a Lost Boy so that means that he’s mine.”

Emma huffs into her split coconut, Felix has made a soup that tastes like Chicken Noodle with a slightly milky aftertaste. She wishes she had crackers to crumble up into it, the third foster home she lived in the woman who wasn’t her mother used to do that.

None of the boys know what crackers are and she’d given up explaining. There’s a bread type thing that soaks up the liquid at the bottom.

“You could just ask him,” she says, Peter snorts a laugh and leaps to his feet, his pipe is in his hands and he starts playing a jaunty tune that she knows from past experience will have everyone on their feet dancing and mock fighting. She sips at her fake milky chicken noodle soup and taps her feet along with the music.

 

******************************************************************************

 

“Hello,” she says, the boy jumps about a foot and whirls around. He has a knife fashioned from a seashell clutched in his hand.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, his voice is slightly high pitched. “You can’t be here, Pan will…”

“Peter won’t hurt you,” she says.

“If he finds you here he will,” the boy says, he waves a hand at her like he can make her vanish into thin air if he just waves hard enough.

Emma rolls her eyes because boys and their antics. It’s almost refreshing to not have one or all of them trying to look up her skirt (even though she’s not wearing a skirt, the first thing she did was convince Peter that skirts were outdated and even though he’d look scandalized he’d relented and lets her wear trousers).

“You should come live in the village,” she says, “I think I’ve almost convinced Peter to build us tree houses.”

 

******************************************************************************

 

She doesn’t manage to convince Baelfire to come live in the village, she pouts a little and Peter tugs her into his side, arm over her shoulders.

“He doesn’t like me,” Peter says. “He thinks I’m, well he thinks I’m a bad guy.”

Emma looks at him, arching an eyebrow. “Are you?”

“I’m trying to protect the island,” Peter says. “You can’t feel it, not yet, you haven’t been here long enough. But the magic protecting it is fading and…”

Emma wraps both arms around him in a hug; he’s stiff and doesn’t reciprocate. She might not be hugging him right; she’s only really seen it in movies and on TV.

“There’s a boy, the truest believer,” Peter says softly, he whispers it like a secret into her hair. “I don’t think he exists yet, but he’s going to save the island, save _us_ and Baelfire is connected to him in some way.”

“Well then we’ll find him,” Emma promises. Peter presses a kiss to the side of her head and awkwardly wraps his arms around her.

 

******************************************************************************

 

Tinkerbell is not a fairy, she’s an ornery adult and she just looks at Emma like she’s something foul that she found on the bottom of her slipper.

“There’s got to be a way,” Emma says.

“You don’t think Pan has tried everything within his power,” Tink says, Emma takes a deep breath and counts to ten.

“Well we haven’t tried _everything_ because Peter says the magic protecting the island is still fading,” Emma says reasonably.

Tink looks at her and laughs. “We… there is no _we_ here child. There’s us and there’s you and you don’t belong here.”

“Then I don’t belong anywhere, I’m here and I want to help.”

“Then stop giving Pan false hope, it only delays the inevitable.”

 

******************************************************************************

 

“I thought Tinkerbell was supposed to be on your side?” Emma asks at dinner that night. Peter lowers his cup and stares at her.

“Where did you see Tink?”

“I was looking for Bae,” she waves her hand, “I found her instead; she says I’m giving you false hope.”

“Tink doesn’t believe that the island can be saved,” Peter says, his face goes dark and Emma shudders a bit.

“What happens to us, if…?” Emma swallows over the lump in her throat.

Peter looks at her, the dark expression on his face fading; he takes her hand and laces their fingers together squeezing her fingers.

“Nothing’s going to happen to us, because we’re going to figure it out.”

 

******************************************************************************

 

Peter keeps the others in line, she watches him sometimes barking his orders to the oldest ones and coaxing the younger ones to do what needs to be done. He doesn’t talk to her in either of those manners.

She doesn’t even realize that he sees her as something other than one of the Lost Children he collects because he’s always unfailingly polite and kind to her in an awkward sort of way that speaks volumes as to how unused to having a female within their midst he is.

It’s so unlike the boys that she used to deal with, the ones that tried to just take what they wanted from her because she lived in foster homes and didn’t have a family and that had to mean that they could push her into locker rooms and bathrooms and try and touch her in places she didn’t want them touching her.

She learned to fight back (not that it got her anywhere but removed from homes that she liked and schools she was doing okay in) when she was twelve and the only thing that stopped her from being raped by a boy five years older than her was a teachers aid coming back for papers.

Peter leaves her little gifts, a bowl of berries, a ribbon that he’s made from scraps of cloth, flowers.

It takes her ages to realize that he’s courting her and it takes her another age to cradle his face between her palms and kiss him gently.

She smiles at him and his lips quirk into an answering one, and Felix catcalls from a distance away.

 

******************************************************************************

 

She was fifteen when she came to Neverland, she’s a few months past her sweet sixteen now, a year has passed though she only knows this because of Bae.

Time doesn’t seem to move, and she’s fairly sure if she looked in a mirror that she would look the exact same as when she’d came.

That’s why it doesn’t dawn her that something is wrong, she hasn’t had a period in over a year and she’s had Peter in her bed for over three months.

She gets sick in the mornings, the smell of rabbit cooking over the fire, the fake tea that the boys make, it all turns her stomach and she can see Peter watching her with worried eyes, holding hushed conferences with Felix and the others.

She ignores it, brushes it away because it’s only for a few hours and then she feels fine until she goes to bed with Peter and wakes up in the morning and the same thing happens over and over again.

There’s one night when they’re lying there and Peter turns into her side, rests his hand on her stomach and just stops.

Stops moving and breathing.

“Emma?” he says and she bites her lip, making a motion like she’s going to roll away from him. He tugs her closer. Hand cupped gently over the swell of her stomach.

She’s pregnant.

They’re kids, in Neverland, and she’s pregnant with Peter Pans child.

 

******************************************************************************

 

Time flies, the slight swell of her stomach turns into a visible mound and everyone knows. They cater to her and somehow in all the commotion Peter convinces Bae that it would be better for all of them if he moved into the village.

Tink presses cool hands to her stomach and whispers strange words.

“All is well,” she says, her hand stays there and she looks over her shoulder to where Peter is sort of hovering in the doorway.

“You’re sure?” he asks, he has that worried tone to his voice that screams his real fear of being abandoned again. Emma’s not going anywhere though and when the baby comes they’ll be a real family.

The kind she always dreamed about.

 

******************************************************************************

 

It all goes wrong when she’s eight months along. She’s taken to making marks (a habit that she’d long ago stopped) to count the days. It feels like she’s been pregnant forever.

She’s out walking with Jasper, he’s holding her arm and they’re laughing at something, she’ll never remember later what and all of a sudden she’s on the ground. She can hear squealing above her and Jasper making a gasping wet sound.

Then a sharp, piercing pain in her abdomen and she maybe screams.

 

******************************************************************************

 

“… Emma, Emma, please,” everything is blurry, foggy but she can hear Peter begging. Feel his hands on her face.

She thinks… she thinks that pain in her stomach is the baby coming.

 

******************************************************************************

 

When she comes awake there is no pain, there’s Peter holding a canteen of some sort to her mouth, feeding her water.

She touches his hand and he lowers the canteen, leaning down to press their foreheads together. There’s wet drops falling on her face and it takes her a moment to realize that he’s crying.

She touches her stomach and it’s flat, no mound where their baby was.

“Peter?” she asks quietly, her eyes well with tears and Peter makes a noise.

“It was a boy,” Peter says, he presses his lips to her cheek, to her lips. “We had a boy.”

 

******************************************************************************

 

The baby had been born early, squalling and screaming and no one seems to know what happened after. Peter had left to go get water from some sort of magical water fall because Emma was dying and the baby was early and when he got back Emma was still alive, but the baby that he had entrusted to Felix and Bae had been dead.

Bae had fled, running off into the woods to hide because he feared Peter’s retribution.

“He was so small,” Felix says, he sits beside her bed and doesn’t touch her.

No one touches her; Peter won’t even lie beside her in the bed too scared of hurting her even though she’s asked him to.

“He’s left Neverland,” Peter says quietly. Emma looks at him; he’s staring at his hands like he’s never seen them before. “I felt him go.”

 

******************************************************************************

 

Things change after that, Peter lays beside her in bed but he doesn’t touch her. It’s like losing the baby had sucked out whatever love he’d felt for her.

She still feels the same, she loves Peter, but she won’t push for something that he can’t give her.

He turns all his attention to finding a way to save the magic of Neverland and she turns all her attention to making sure the boys remember that even with Peter’s focus elsewhere that he still cares for them all.

 

******************************************************************************

 


End file.
